Many years ago, grocery stores and large retailers initiated the development of standards and technologies for receiving inventory and accepting and reconciling invoices from multiple vendors. Use of structured digital data and standard communication interfaces for exchanging purchase and delivery information was much faster than traditional hand-written invoices. Many DSD suppliers also recognized the benefits of these technologies and adopted them quickly because it allowed drivers to make deliveries and reconcile discrepancies and invoicing errors with the customer at time of delivery, as opposed to the more costly process of reconciling after the delivery.
The DEX/UCS standard remains a vital part of the retail environment today. However, new problems have emerged. Recent advances in mobile consumer electronics, particularly the power, flexibility, and convenience of smartphones and tablets, have led many DSD suppliers to transition to new devices for their drivers. In many cases, this transition has necessitated a redevelopment of many of the mobile applications currently used by DSD suppliers to adapt them for these new operating systems and devices. Many companies now supply hardware and/or software for the DEX/UCS standard, including, but not limited to, the DEX Toolkit for .NET® Development by Intermec, Inc. (a subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc.). Even with such robust tools available to help master DEX/UCS transactions for retail, developers need to acquire specific knowledge of the DEX/UCS process, structure, function, and format of the transactions sets used in order to truly integrate it into new or existing mobile applications with data constraints or defined user interfaces. In some instances, developers may also need to understand the communications protocols used to send and receive DEX/UCS data. Acquiring such a knowledgebase can be costly and time consuming.
Therefore, there is a need for a “plug and play” DEX/UCS solution that removes the requirement for developers to know the structure, function, and format of DEX/UCS transaction sets and to make the DEX/UCS process independent from the existing business logic of many mobile applications.